I titled this piece as Snowy Smiles, because she normally doesn't. This was one of those rare instances that I caught her smiling that I took my camera phone right away to capture that moment. With that, I decided to make her my next subject for a dog painting after Gabbie.
Just like before, I started the painting with a line drawing, keeping close attention to the proportion, light and dark patterns and shapes. In achieving likeness, the constructive drawing method can be used but that would have taken me longer. Instead, so I looked at shapes, but with an understanding of the animals anatomy and form construction. They are still useful when checking and judging the solidity of the subject.
The sketch started out rough. I marked down the overall shape, layout and proportion first. Then I progressively modified, erased, and cleaned-up the lines as I go. I'm still not as confident in laying-down the colors directly. I rely heavily in a good solid drawing to give me some structure before I add color. Eventually, I would like to paint with color directly.
Once the drawing was good enough, I then started adding color. Color was the aspect of painting that I had been so intimidated to do because I didn't understand it enough. In my previous artworks, I usually just glaze the colors over a grayscale drawing and be done with it. But it's more coloring than actually painting. So to fill-in the gaps in my knowledge and understanding of how to use color in painting, I am taking some self-paced art courses about color and light. Starting with the Cali and the Gabbie paintings, and now with this painting, my process have changed. With the lessons I'm learning so far, I'm trying out a different process. I've completely skipped the grayscale step and went straight to color after the line drawing. Eventually, I would like to try painting straight to color without the line drawing anymore. Till the, I'm quite pleased with the results here so far.
Here's a look at that process.
And here's a shorter version.
